Slob (20 page)

"Yeah," Lester agreed enthusiastically, "that's right, man. That som'bitch's lame."

"He's a lame, jive-ass
motherfucker."

"Damn right he's lame. I don't know why—"

"Got to kick his bogus Deuce ass out o' there and get somebody can deal real. We be dealing some fucking
weight
here, motherfucker."

"Fuckin' lame Flames. Shit, man, fuckin' Warlord faggots dealin' big numbers goddammit and that's—"

"Fuckin' Whore Lards."

"Yeah," Lester agreed, laughing, "the fuckin'
Whore
Lords."

"The Whore
Lards,
you dumb, midget punk," Tree said viciously.

"Yeah"—Lester giggled—"lard-ass Whore
Lards."

"I'm gon' to get that shit from Apache and Saturday we'll get the meth and the hydrochloric acid 'n shit and go out to the point and have us a fuckin'
cookout,
motherfucker.

"Yeah!"

"Man, soon's I can get me another two grand we're goin' to fuckin' Big A, man."

"Huh?"

"Thas' right, motherfuck. Fuckin'
Australia,
man. That's where it is, pud. That's where the freedom's at now. Fuckin' Peter whatshisname, Peter-eater, remember that limey cocksuck?"

"Eh?"

"The limey, English fucker you pud. Well, anyway, that motherfucker says like it's wide open over there in motherfuckin' Australia, man. An' I'll take Debbie and you take that ugly bitch of yours and we'll go over there and live like fuckin' kings." Debbie was his slave; a pathetic, morose, robotlike teenager who worked with them as part-time janitorial help. Physically unattractive and unwanted, she played out the parts of his twisted psychosexual fantasies because, at least so far, perverted attention was better than none.

"Fuckin' Australia? Gawddamn, I dunno where it is even onna' fuckin' map."

"You dumb li'l runtcunt, you don't know where your shitty ass is either but you can still manage to wipe it oncet in a while, cancha'?"

"Yeah, I rectum so," he said, achieving for him what was a veritable Everest peak of wit.

Bunkowski had been watching them for about half a block, coming silently behind them, stalking them in the darkness. He could make out most of the absurd, moronic conversation as he drew closer now, and the light glinted off the chain that the one called Tree wore over his shoulder, the thing that had caught Daniel's eye in the first place.

Tree wore a huge chain, something off a motorcycle perhaps, an enormous thing that he ran through one of the shoulder loops on his leather jacket, and down into his pocket, to a heavy weight of keys, the other end of the long chain fastened to his belt. He liked to whip the keys out in a fight, and it was the silver chain catching the light that Daniel had seen.

He loved the idea of taking off this pair of drooling punks with his own chain, a yard of taped tractor chain that had killed and killed again, and he planned to smack these loud-talking, ignorant insects just as you might swat a pair of buzzing mosquitoes. He liked to kill any living human, but little people were his first love, little strutting cocky bantam-rooster braggart smart-aleck punk loud-talking, ignorant little people wearing chains were right up his alley.

"That shit we cooked up before was fucking decent, man. I mean it drummed on the inside of y'r head all fuckin'
day.
We can cook that shit and man, I'll be the fucking king of Australia." Tree had begun his fantasy-obsession about Australia several weeks ago, how they could go over and sell crank free from any laws, and so deep was the structure of his psychosis that each day he built another imaginary layer onto the foundation of his Australian dreamworld. He really believed at that moment, that any day now he'd be buying his tickets for the big boat ride to a ripe, wide-open paradise without authority or law.

"They ain't hardly no big gangs ovah there, man. We can fucking
control
the crank market overnight. Brew up our own good shit. Be dealin three, four pounds a day. Be the fuckin'
kings
of—"

They smelled Chaingang before they heard him or saw him, which isn't hard to understand when you consider that he was now spending most of his time down in a specially built trap hidden in a submain of the Chicago sewage system. Tree and Lester were no fragrant flowers themselves, but this—this thing could be smelled, sensed, half a block away, and as he drew near to them coming up behind them on the street even the most desensitized dolt would instinctively turn and look at the looming apparition coming up out of the night. In-stink-tively.

Tree had the first syllable of his precious Australia in his mouth when he went down, appropriately, right in the middle of becoming the king of Aus—he caught the first chainsnap from the heavy, taped links that came snaking, snapping out silently and catching him along the hypothalamus and the medula oblongata and taking his dream down for good in a wet, scarlet sheet of blinding pain and smashed cells, tissue, vertebrae, cartilage, nerves, spine, brain. Lights out. And Bunkowski's tree-limb wrist snaps it back and out again in a lightning bolo throw; a vicious, unstoppable, furiously whizzing, deadly spinning chainsaw of certain death flung with incredible strength, and yet, amazingly, missing.

Missing! Daniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski didn't know the word.
Missing
was not a part of his comprehension. The vocabulary was new. It took a giant heartbeat to sink in, that his killer chain had spun by Missing
MISSING
this insignificant wimp crashing through the side window of a parked Ford Escort in an explosion of spider-tracked safety glass. And in that heartbeat Leaping Lester did the only thing the little nerd was any good at. He fled. He got up on those filthy tenny-runs of his and he flat out boogied. He booked like the wind. And he was goneski.

And Chaingang, killer of five hundred, killer of families, killer of professional mercs, killer of head-hunters, killer of hardcore soldiers, the assassin's assassin—stood motionless in his tracks. Chaingang stood there over the inert form of the Flames' fallen warrior Little Tree, and watched as a lucky wimp named Lester did the thing he did best. And for the first time he felt a nudge deep inside the bulky body somewhere, this man, this beast that knew no such emotions as fear or apprehension felt something and he could identify it, alien as it was. Because he had MISSED. Because he had been seen. Because he had made another mistake.

And Jack Eichord the cop would not know of this for a time. He was busy in the middle of a meeting where he was hearing was what shit-assed, bad, amateurish police work he'd been doing. Not him personally, you understand, just any warm body involved in Kasikoff, anybody who'd managed to let this ballbusting mother come turn around and kick the PC's ass, which in turn caused the chief to get
his
ass reamed, which is how come the deputy chief had the end of
his
dick stepped on, which is why all these cops were working a sixteen-hour day and still stuck in the cop shop at this late hour in an emergency meeting of the coppers in the Sylvia Kasikoff investigation.

Because this morning the package came. The package with the neat, block-lettered JACK ICORD, the one with the bad weight and the loose, harum-scarum feel; the one Jack was afraid of long before he examined the writing, long before he had them open it up in the bomb vault downstairs, long before he saw what was in the package the thing had sent him.

This was the morning the papers would go back to when the Lonely Hearts killings became a new headline in the tabloids. This would be the day Eichord would remember for a long time to come, and a day that would keep him awake at night goading him, stabbing at him with the little ice picks of fear each time he thought about the package and what it meant. This would be the day that put him to bed more naked than he could ever remember being; more vulnerable to evil, his outer covering of hard cop removed, decorticated by the awfulness of it, stripped bare like a tree with the bark peeled away.

This would be the day the papers began calling the sensational case the Jack-of-Hearts Murders.

W
hat they could have done, what they normally do, is throw the shredded paper mass into the incinerators and erase the computer memories and a thing simply ceases to exist. They are the people who first used
stonewall
as a transitive verb. When they chose to forget something or somebody, that thing or that person never existed. But because of the time and the pressures and the sensitivities and the climate, something still lived on to tell of the beast's existence. And it couldn't have been more telltale if it had in fact been a bloody smear right there on the printout.

"Extension 2228," Eichord said, waiting as the line hissed all the way to Washington. Had they simply shit-canned it, what the administrators would normally do, that would have been the end of it. But some dim-witted, superbureaucratic type at a desk decided to classify the prints, blood group, and the related ident of those individuals involved in what had once been our military/clandestine intelligence shop's most secret experiment—once called Special Action Unit/Covert Operations Group, pronounced "saw-cog," a euphemistic acronym meaning assassination squad.

And so instead of "No Response" or "Insufficient Data" or whatever, instead of the normal absence of data the feds kicked it right back with an "Officially Deleted," which lit up the printout like a neon sign.

Eichord had been on the telephone for over two hours and his arm was so numb he thought for a second he might be having a small heart attack. And then the phrase
heart attack
slapped his brain around a bit; as a crisp, female voice snapped him out of it:

"Twenty-two, twenty-eight?"

"Sonny Shoenburgen, please," he told her.

"One moment please," she said, pleasantly putting him on hold.

"Thank you," he told a hissing Ma Bell, AT and fucking T, Western Electric, and God only knows what other congloms all seething in their postdivestiture irritation, all hissing at him from within the sanitized, swept, shielded, sound-secure landlines of one of the largest spook complexes west of the Atlantic.

Finally, after what seemed like a month or so, a different voice comes back on the lines, this one male, not quite so pleasant or friendly saying:

"May I help you?"

"Sonny?"

"I'm sorry but we have no one here by that name."

"Listen, I'm with Justice and this is an emergency so cut the crap and put Sonny Shoenburgen on, please."

"Sorry, but he's tied up in a meeting," the voice said after a very brief hesitation. "May I tell Colonel Shoenburgen who's calling, sir?"

"Tell Sonny it's Jack Eichord, E-I-C-H-O-R-D, and I need to talk to him very briefly but I need it to be
now.

"Right." Another hesitation. "And you're with whom, did you say?"

"Justice department," he lied smoothly.

"Yes, sir, one moment please." The lines hissed and booed again. One moment could be anything. He had once waited one moment for Federal Express on a weekend call that had run twenty-five minutes of the most tortured Muzak to which he'd ever been subjected. Twenty-five ear splitting minutes of some of the most wonderful ass-kissing ricky-tick numbers imaginable. A moment in D.C. time could be fucking anything. He was reaching his telephone tolerance for the day. It was a thing that had crept up his left arm, then his right arm, into both ears, and was now drilling inward, inward toward the soft core of the brain.

"Yeah?" the voice said, quietly.

"Hello?" He had been on the line for some time, picking up his phone without a discernible click. Some cordless, shapeless thing that you never touched, Jack supposed. A telephone that was formed like a microorganism and surgically implanted, perhaps. These bastards had everything.

"Sonny, it's Jack Eichord."

"Agh, you worthless heap of dog shit whatcha' up to?"

"Up to no good. I—"

"You here?"

"Huh?"

"You here in D.C.?"

"No. Chicago. Chicago PD at the moment on a homicide case."

"Jesus H. S. Christ, Junior. Whenja' move to Chi-town?"

"Well, I didn't move here exactly. I'm on loan to 'm for a serial-murder thing. Through Major Crimes. I'm in some deep damn puppy poop too. I wanna' tell ya'."

"I don't doubt that for a damn second." The colonel laughed.

"I need some— "

"Hey! Since when are you with Justice, asshole."

"What time is it now? How many victims. He's a real maniac. Cuts their hearts out. Leaves whole families mutilated. It's one of the worst serial-murder cases ever. We gotta' run this down."

"Okay. But nobody puts 'Officially deleted' on filed fingerprints. Certainly nobody here. Nobody at the Company. The Bureau. I never heard of an agency doin' it. If you see deleted in a sanitized or declassified document that's being downgraded after so many years, just as an example, like something the agency has to make available under the Freedom of Information Act, you know damn well it's nothing very sensitive to begin with or it'd never got a new rubber stamp. That's the nature of restricted material. This is an error. Some tired clerk who— "